Where does man search for meaning? Man in the way that Neil Armstrong said and possibly meant. How quickly things that are profound become routine. They started counting the “important” Apollos at 11 and stopped at 17, after everyone else tuned their TV dinners to another station. A giant leap it wasn’t, sorry to say, or at least one too few made, them that saw us for what we are: a pale blue dot, full of kings and heroes and despots and in the end, so much ash. Seen from outside we are small and remote and fragile. From inside more so, but less seen.
The bootprints left behind are entombed photographically, probably actually upoetically scattered by the ascent engine into a permanent scar. Permanent in our lifetimes, at least, so small and remote and fragile. Even all of our history stretches hardly back at all, from the perspective of the pock marks.
Most of us aren’t so lucky. Our prints are lost faster in a sea of meaningless others, lacking Tranquility. Instantly awash, unnoticed, we scrabble along the surface of our sphere.
Sometimes though our imprints are carried by others for a while to be put down elsewhere. Sometimes those carried are all that is left, our collective consciousness cajoled into contorting this way or that in a momentary flash, or the echo of a remembered tune. Sometimes it’s sticky, as in the ability to carry fire, to raise water by it, to explain either and argue amongst us. Sometimes it should be but isn’t. Sorry, Neil, a new era it wasn’t, it was a new same, plus photographs of footprints.
Still, an echo, little or big, is carried in each of us of all of us, for what are we but words and stories and memories? We are pattern making machines, repeating and reap-eating and re-peating machines, each time imperfect. Prone to error and superstition. These machines we are we carry around, bumping into each other, depositing bits of each other. Echoes. We can know almost nothing that wasn’t first a part of someone else, save what we conjure from fragments and smash out of clay or marble or malaprops. The makers have it figured out, I think. Their knitted socks wear holes but only in the walking.
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